I don&#x27;t think he meant it like that. I echo the sentiment: it shouldn&#x27;t have come to this. It should not have been a social, political, or legal issue. There&#x27;s so much hate and bigotry in this country that needs to go away.edit: at least I hope he didn&#x27;t mean it like that :(

Spoken like a person who&#x27;s never been locked in jail for 10 years and been repeatedly beaten and raped during that time, all for selling pot.There are a lot bigger problems than being refused a small amount of government subsidies for your relationship choices. (Note that I am also refused those subsidies since I&#x27;m single.)

I hear it as &quot;issue&quot; with some sarcasm. As in, I can&#x27;t believe this isn&#x27;t settled already since it&#x27;s such an obvious answer. I believe he is saying it wouldn&#x27;t be an &quot;issue&quot; if people actually appealed to reason.But I get why you would be offended, the struggles and hardships should not be taken lightly. In effect a white male could make the same comment about women&#x27;s suffrage and it would not be cast in a good light at all.Anyway, congratulations! I&#x27;m so glad people are finally seeing reason and you can take one more step towards being treated truly equal!

I think you&#x27;re misinterpreting my comment.  I absolutely believe that all people deserve equal treatment and opportunities.  We obviously aren&#x27;t there yet, and far too many LGBT folks have been treated horribly for far too long.  I find it shameful and embarrassing that our lawmakers have persisted these backwards &quot;anti-X&quot; policies that &quot;should&quot; have never taken root at all.  I&#x27;m hopeful that soon we&#x27;ll look back at these anti-LGBT policies the same way we look at racist, sexist, etc. policies from the pre-60&#x27;s US.

I think it was meant more that this decision and this right for LGBTQ to get married should have been made ages ago. As a society, we&#x27;re continuing to spend resources fighting amongst ourselves to combat bigotry, anti-intellectualism, etc. In an ideal world, we&#x27;d have stomped all these out already and would be working together towards the future. Sadly, we don&#x27;t live in an ideal world, so we must expend these resources and effort fighting injustice and inequality.

The hope expressed here, which I share, is that settling marriage equality can help move us to a world in which politics isn&#x27;t dominated by a discussion of what or who people consent to do with their own bodies.You don&#x27;t need to be straight to think that there are deeper issues which which still exist that, if solved, could have made marriage equality something which was never controversial. For example, why should any government have any say over whose relationship is legitimate?There&#x27;s an old idea that the government exists to serve the governed and that any situation in which it intervenes should only be to protect them, not to dictate the terms of their religion or their private lives. And yet the US government is in a situation where it seems to often serve the interests of only those who can hire lobbyists. Protection is redefined as protecting the wealth of those few, and elected representatives focus their campaigns on the most divisive cultural and religious issues over which they have minimal influence to distract from what they actually do on a daily basis, which is mostly meeting with lobbyists.Plenty of people will vote for one party solely based on their support or opposition to a single issue such as abortion or marriage equality, and while those are important issues, they have allowed politicians to get away with whatever else they have wanted to sneak into their agendas.

Spoken like a straight person who has never been denied the ability to do something straight people take for granted.

Could not agree more! As a straight person I couldn&#x27;t give a st

I would argue that the state of the economy, mass political failure, infrastructure decay, wars in the Middle East, how the US deals with globalization, climate change, and income inequality are more important from a national perspective than both. We (Americans) spend an inordinate amount of time debating religious and social issues (which are ultimately irrelevant for most people involved in the debates) while ignoring huge systemic problems. People should be focusing their attention on real, pressing problems, not opposing social change which has little to do with them. Get out of the way and let progress occur so we can be productive. I think this is what the parent commenter meant.

5-10%? Are you saying that every 10th person is gay in America?

What&#x27;s more important. Denial of a basic social rite to the 5-10% who are gay, or something like NSA spying that gets tremendous attention on places like HN but only has a material impact on almost nobody?

As a straight Christian who isn&#x27;t against gay marriage, I agree, but I know the energy that the &quot;church&quot; puts into opposing it is why it as required this much energy. There are so many issues deserving of the church&#x27;s time and energy (divorce rates, addiction, child trafficking, etc) yet too many are stuck on this one.

It&#x27;s possible to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. Just because drought in California is much more serious problem than Vibrio vulnificus in the Baltic Sea doesn&#x27;t mean we should disregard bacterias altogether. Gay rights are not a distraction from Something More Important, it&#x27;s just one of many issues that have to be taken care of in parallel.

Hopefully this whole &quot;issue&quot; will just go away soon...so many more important things that deserve the public&#x27;s attention.Edit: To clarify, I support marriage equality and believe this is great news that deserves celebrating.

It helps if you have a lot of people taking bites at once.

Are you calling me an elephant? Now I&#x27;ll never fit in my wedding dress! &#x2F;runsaway(guys, it&#x27;s a joke)

You eat an elephant one bite at a time.EDIT: I did not mean to cause a trainwreck below this comment. It was the quickest way on mobile to communicate &quot;all big problems are tackled one task at a time&quot;.

OK downvoters [EDIT: previously parent post had been grayed-out, now it appears this one is?], do you really not know that this is a thing? Lots of mommies and daddies don&#x27;t want little Jenny and Billy looked after by a dude. I don&#x27;t know what being gay has to do with it, except perhaps &#x27;taki1 is telling us that gay dudes are more likely to want to work in child care than straight dudes are. Maybe that&#x27;s true?

Once they see a male working in a Child Care Center there is going to be lawsuit, that&#x27;s for sure.Isn&#x27;t this a gender discrimination problem, not a sexual orientation problem?

not to mention how hard it is for gays to land a job in early years education. So backwards! The worst are these mothers. Once they see a male working in a Child Care Center there is going to be lawsuit, that&#x27;s for sure. Gay male employee at Child Care Center? I hope there will be some progress too!

I blame the Dean, although it&#x27;s been established he&#x27;s not gay, that&#x27;s putting him in a box, he&#x27;s much more...he&#x27;s a politician.

&gt; it definitely helps to have gay culture and gay icons just out there in the world, melded seamlessly with the rest of society.On one hand I agree, but it&#x27;s never been sufficient. There have been gay icons for a long time (probably forever); Oscar Wilde springs to mind, and Alan Turing (though I don&#x27;t know if he was well-known to the public). And even with their status, they were still persecuted and ruined.

I blame Glee.I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek but it definitely helps to have gay culture and gay icons just out there in the world, melded seamlessly with the rest of society. This includes things like trashy teen comedies and musicals and what not.Having equal marriage rights is just one more step in the right direction of having a more tolerant, loving earth society.

&gt; It&#x27;s amazing how quickly gay rights have advanced in the western world.The irony is that in India right now we are using a very old colonial British India law to put gay people in jail.

Great decision. It&#x27;s amazing how quickly gay rights have advanced in the western world.Unfortunately it&#x27;s still legal in many states to discriminate against employees on the basis of sexual orientation. Hopefully that&#x27;s next to be fixed.

I agree with your sentiment, but no with your account name. I don&#x27;t think you deserve to be downvoted.

Polygamous&#x2F;polyamorous relationships can easily be supported from a property rights standpoint using corporate entities (LLCs). I see it as the ultimate social&#x2F;political hack for a right.

&gt; adultery and extra-marital sex are not crimesIt&#x27;s still illegal in 21 states[0]. Those laws however are rarely enforced.[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theweek.co.uk&#x2F;62723&#x2F;adultery-laws-where-is-cheating-still-illegal" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theweek.co.uk&#x2F;62723&#x2F;adultery-laws-where-is-cheati...</a>

&gt;The judges should declare all consenting marriage legal !If it is truly consenting, taking into account the modern defined limits on who can give consent, why not? A polygamous relationship is already legal in practice (adultery and extra-marital sex are not crimes). The paperwork and law changes aren&#x27;t going to be simple, but besides for that I don&#x27;t see a justification in continuing the ban.

It absolutely should be restricted by age.

SSM and polygamy are not really related issues. You run into very complicated issues when you consider how children and property ownership would work in a many-person relationship. Marriage specifies shortcuts for these kinds of things, but they only work for two-person relationships. Polygamous relationships would basically require unique contracts given all circumstances, which is a pretty high burden. It&#x27;s also not clear that polygamous marriages would have the same kind of societal benefits that two-person marriages have.I think it&#x27;s a point that can be convincingly argued, but the legalization of SSM does not imply a requirement for polygamous marriage&#x27;s legalization. They&#x27;re entirely different issues.

Why the downvotes? Is that not a valid point? Or is it bad because it&#x27;s a point used by the opposing side? Or is the problem the way it was stated?

I wish more people saw it this way. The fact that a government has any say in who can&#x2F;can&#x27;t marry and be with in their private lives is absurd. The concept of marriage should be left up to religious entities.

It should be restricted by age, but even when I don&#x27;t agree with you on that point, I don&#x27;t understand the downvotes (not that I really care about internet points BTW)

I doubt the USA keeps an eye on Canadian legal cases (though Commonwealth countries certainly do) but Canada&#x27;s polygamy laws were tested by a high court very recently (2011). The existing laws were upheld.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;canada&#x2F;british-columbia&#x2F;canada-s-polygamy-laws-upheld-by-b-c-supreme-court-1.856480" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;canada&#x2F;british-columbia&#x2F;canada-s-poly...</a>

I think I prefer the term &#x27;polyamorous&#x27;, but agreed :)

If love is about ignoring race,class,gender,age shouldn&#x27;t it be about ignoring numbers, too?Polygamy is the next hurdle for society.The judges should declare all consenting marriage legal !

Not sure why you got downvoted because I&#x27;m reading Roberts&#x27; decision now and that&#x27;s a big part of it.

From what I read it is not a states right argument but an argument that the supreme court is supposed to interpert the laws not make them. Some quotes:&quot;Today, however, the Court takes the extraordinary stepof ordering every State to license and recognize same-sexmarriage. Many people will rejoice at this decision, and I begrudge none their celebration. But for those who believe in a government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach is deeply disheartening. Supporters of same-sexmarriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens—through the democratic process—toadopt their view. That ends today. Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriageas a matter of constitutional law. Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much moredifficult to accept.&quot;&quot;But this Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us.Under the Constitution, judges have power to say whatthe law is, not what it should be. The people who ratifiedthe Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will but merely judgment.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton) (capitalization altered).&quot;

Well all rights not defined in the Constitution are inherently in the domain of the states. Marriage is not within the Constitution and this was not a Constitutional issue. This came before the courts mainly because Federal Law needed to be applied to all states for issues concerning pay, benefits, visitation, and so on. So it was more similar to interstate commerce than anything, it certainly wasn&#x27;t under the equal protection clause because there had not been a national law denoting the designation as existing. No any attempts to say other wise can be slapped down by 14th Amendment challenges - as in gay couples are designated properly within the confines of the law (likely it may take a bill similar to the civil rights law to make it unquestionable)

It&#x27;s almost assuredly a &quot;States Rights&quot; argument. I&#x27;d be really shocked if it wasn&#x27;t.

I plan to read both sides later, but I don&#x27;t expect to be able to fit them in during lunch time.

I respect Scalia as a scholar and philosopher.  But I couldn&#x27;t find anything in his dissent that couldn&#x27;t equally apply to desegregation.

Ironically, Scalia&#x27;s language in Windsor and Lawrence before that were what opened the door to federal courts nationwide overturning gay marriage bans:&quot;The real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by ‘bare … desire to harm’ couples in same-sex marriages. How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status&quot; (Windsor, J. Scalia, dissenting).“[W]hat justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution’? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.” (Lawrence, J. Scalia, dissenting).Roberts also argued Scalia&#x27;s own logic back at him in this week&#x27;s decision upholding the ACA, noting that in 2012 in the decision upholding the requirement to buy health insurance Scalia had stated in his dissent that without the subsidies (for low income insurance buyers), &quot;the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended&quot; because health insurance would be too expensive for low-income taxpayers.

Don&#x27;t get the tl;dr summary of Scalia&#x27;s dissent; actually read it. Scalia is obnoxious and mean-spirited (and in fine form this time), but he&#x27;s a really good writer, the fun- to- read kind.IIRC, he wrote a book on writing with Brian Garner, of usage dictionary fame.

Extended version w&#x2F; quotes:Roberts:- &quot;[T]his Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be.&quot;- &quot;The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage.&quot;- &quot;Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens—through the democratic process—to adopt their view. That ends today. Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law. Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept.&quot;- &quot;It is important to note with precision which laws petitioners have challenged. Although they discuss some of the ancillary legal benefits that accompany marriage, such as hospital visitation rights and recognition of spousal status on official documents, petitioners’ lawsuits target the laws defining marriage generally rather than those allocating benefits specifically. The equal protection analysis might be different, in my view, if we were confronted with a more focused challenge to the denial of certain tangible benefits.&quot;Scalia:- &quot;This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.&quot;- &quot;We have no basis for striking down a practice that is not expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment’s text, and that bears the endorsement of a long tradition of open, widespread, and unchallenged use dating back to the Amendment’s ratification. Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples, the public debate over same-sex marriage must be allowed to continue. But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law.&quot;Thomas:- &quot;[T]he majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a &#x27;liberty&#x27; that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government.&quot;- &quot;Whether we define &#x27;liberty&#x27; as locomotion or freedom from governmental action more broadly, petitioners have in no way been deprived of it. Petitioners cannot claim, under the most plausible definition of &#x27;liberty,&#x27; that they have been imprisoned or physically restrained by the States for participating in same-sex relationships. To the contrary, they have been able to cohabitate and raise their children in peace.&quot;Alito:- &quot;The question in these cases, however, is not what States should do about same-sex marriage but whether the Constitution answers that question for them. It does not. The Constitution leaves that question to be decided by the people of each State.&quot;- &quot;To prevent five unelected Justices from imposing their personal vision of liberty upon the American people, the Court has held that &#x27;liberty&#x27; under the Due Process Clause should be understood to protect only those rights that are &#x27;deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’ ...And it is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage is not among those rights.&quot;------Disclaimer, IANAL - just picked the quotes that stuck out at me in each dissent.Roberts&#x27; and Scalia&#x27;s central theme was the Court overstepping its bounds and ending the legislative process prematurely. To me Roberts was essentially saying, &quot;You guys are winning this on the legislative front easily, this is not something SCOTUS needs to decide.&quot; Thomas&#x27; was pretty cryptic and relied on lots of quotes from 18th and 19th century thinkers to define &quot;liberty.&quot; Alito appealed to tradition and worried about this outcome producing a rush of lawsuits from religious institutions who were left in a limbo by the decision; he would have preferred state or national legislation that could clarify how this affected religious schools and such.

Roberts: definition of marriage should be made by legislation.Scalia: The Supreme Court has too much power any time it does not agree with me.Thomas: Due Process doesn&#x27;t include right to be married.Alito: Power in this matter is reserved to the States individually. Also, the Supreme Court has too much power any time it does not agree with me.

Considering there are plenty of examples of &quot;gay&quot; marriage from thousands of years ago, calling strait marriage traditional seems factually incorrect.Edit: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catholicworldreport.com&#x2F;Item&#x2F;1367&#x2F;gay_marriagenothing_new_under_the_sun.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catholicworldreport.com&#x2F;Item&#x2F;1367&#x2F;gay_marriagenot...</a>

I think they summarise their arguments themselves. For example&quot;Although the policy arguments for extending marriage to same-sex couples may be compelling, the legal arguments for requiring such an extension are not. The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational. In short, our Constitution does not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a State are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition.&quot;[p. 2 of Robert&#x27;s opinion, p. 41 of the pdf]
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;14pdf&#x2F;14-556_3204.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;14pdf&#x2F;14-556_3204.pdf</a>

Is there a general summary of the arguments made by the dissenting 4?

The other 40% are not necessarily against it completely - they may want gay marriage but want to call it civil unions.

It&#x27;s hardly a new concept, either. In fact, the root of the latin word &quot;pagan&quot; just means &quot;rustic villager in the country&quot;. When Christianity became en vogue in the Roman Empire, it was the rednecks out in the country who were resistant to it, so the word &quot;pagan&quot; became synonymous with &quot;heathen&quot;.

Culturally, rural areas tend to be quite a bit more...backwards. And I say this as someone who grew up in a farm house.

It&#x27;s statistics, it&#x27;s as accurate as a national weather report. Correct for the most part, wrong in some areas.Depends on the questions but I&#x27;m willing to bet a large majority of that 40 percent could care less either way and therefore don&#x27;t show up as &quot;supporting&quot; the idea.Regardless, getting a large number of people like this to change their viewpoint on an ingrained ideology within a generation&#x27;s time is impressive.

But look at the rate of increase.It&#x27;s only in the recent past that it broke the 50% barrier.The trend is upwards - 60% is not the end point.

Absolutely - and this trend is only accelerating... as Americans, we&#x27;re surrounding ourselves more and more with people of a similar world view. I can see how it happens (and I&#x27;m the same, with the vast majority of my friends and social circle university-educated, reasonably progressive, etc.) but it does distort our ability to imagine what the rest of the society&#x27;s thinking.

An additional factor is that opposition to gay marriage is heavily skewed toward the elderly.  I doubt the OP has a large social circle among the medicare crowd, but that is where the pool of opposition remains the strongest.  We are just going to have to wait for them to die off.

When you say &quot;in my area it is more like 90-95%&quot; are you referring to your perceived thoughts on what the rate would be, or are you referring to an actual poll?If the former, than your area is probably not 90-95%, your social community is 90-95%. People tend to surround themselves with people with similar views. So it seems like in your town everyone is for gay marriage, when in fact it&#x27;s the people in your town that you interact with that are for gay marriage. You don&#x27;t know the opinion of those in your town who you don&#x27;t associate with.For example, if you asked me what percentage of the population smoked cigarettes, I would say 5-10%. That&#x27;s because very few people I hang out with smoke cigarettes. If I were to walk into a bar (well... outside the bar) in a different neighbourhood, I might be surprised to see that 90% of people there are smoking.

Honestly, without knowing the exact question it&#x27;s hard to predict what the numbers will be. For example, there used to be a ~15% spread between people who supported gays and lesbians in the military vs. homosexuals in the military. [With another ~15% gap between &#x27;serve in the military&#x27; vs. &#x27;serve openly in the military&#x27;. The things we choose to care about...]There is almost certainly a question phrasing that would yield something similar to your general sense of people&#x27;s opinions (once you adjust for the fact you do not interact with randomly selected people, and tend to discuss the issue only with those who feel safe sharing their opinion with you).

Because you can choose read&#x2F;watch&#x2F;work&#x2F;live that is agreeable to your preference, yes one&#x27;s perception can be very skewed.Visit some parts of US and it&#x27;s not 90-95%. And I think some that say they support it but privately they don&#x27;t care or don&#x27;t actually agree. It&#x27;s not cool to oppose SSM in certain industry, age group, etc etc.

&quot;A recent Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans – an all-time high – support extending the same rights and privileges to same-sex marriages as traditional ones.&quot;only 60% of US citizens support same-sex marraige? in my area it is more like 90-95%, this was surprising and sad for me to hear

The SCOTUS shouldn&#x27;t wait on consensus. They don&#x27;t need that. They need to decide if it is legal or not. If it is not, send it back to Congress to fix. While I agree with the ruling, this court has been doing things clearly outside its purview.

&gt; Nobody in 1789 would have said that gay marriage is a fundamental right.Its marriage. Its a fundamental right.It doesn&#x27;t matter if you are gay or straight.&gt; It is important that the Court not act ahead of society.That is another way of saying &quot;Yes, the judicial system is as political as politicians.&quot;One of the primary purposes of the Court is to make sure the political majority can&#x27;t deny equal rights to everyone in the country. The idea they have to wait for that political majority to exist before &quot;giving people&quot; rights is an awful idea.&gt; I&#x27;m also a strong supporter of abortion rights, but I can&#x27;t help but wonder if in the long run abortion rights wouldn&#x27;t be in a stronger position today had the Court waited a bit longer for public consensus to catch up before dictating a result.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roe_v._Wade#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Roevwade.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roe_v._Wade#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Roevwa...</a>
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;160058&#x2F;majority-americans-support-roe-wade-decision.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;160058&#x2F;majority-americans-support...</a>They did wait for a majority before Roe v. Wade as well. :&#x2F;

I generally agree, but ...&gt; At bottom, this isn&#x27;t a right flowing from the dictates of the Constitution. Nobody in 1789 would have said that gay marriage is a fundamental right. We acknowledge the right today for the same reason we acknowledge many other rights we did not acknowledge then--society as a whole has agreed to recognize the rightLooking at just the legal aspects, in 1789 (and 1776) we did recognize that &#x27;all men are created equal&#x27; and equal protection (and due process might apply too). From those rights flows the idea that a right conferred to some, such as marraige, should not be denied to others.&gt; It is important that the Court not act ahead of society.I wonder how much of this is due to the Court being unable to act far ahead of society. The Court has no real power of enforcement; for example, when the Supreme Court ruled for Indians whose land was siezed in Georgia, President Andrew Jackson (now on your $20 bill) famously said &quot;[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.&quot;If they rule and are ignored, they lose credibility and influence and gain nothing. I wonder how often judges take than into consideration (especially judges in lower courts, such as municipal courts).

Support for interracial marriage didn&#x27;t pass 50% until the &#x27;90s, but SCOTUS ruled decades before that.The fact that they waited until after support for SSM passed 50% is what&#x27;s unusual.

&gt; Nobody in 1789 would have said that gay marriage is a fundamental right.That&#x27;s one of those assertions that relies on present-day society always believing they are more socially advanced than earlier ages, and that society moves forward monotonically in lock step around the world.In fact, modern American society is a lot more prudish about same-sex unions of various types than earlier societies in Rome, Greece, and China at various times. It&#x27;s very likely that one could find contemporaries of the authors of our Constitution, in comparable circumstances of economic and cultural development, who thought same sex unions are perfectly OK.The men of 1789 who wrote the Constitution wrote a document they aspired to. Pretty obviously in the case of slavery, but in many other ways.They explicitly said they could not enumerate rights. If you think otherwise, I&#x27;d like to know what you think of the following:If someone invented a brain accelerator that imparted god-like intelligence, would you have a right to use it, or would the government grant such a right?If someone cured old age, would you have a right to access that cure? Or would government have a say in this novel, unprecedented thing?If someone invented an unbreakable code, would you have a right to what amounts to an uncrackable safe for your &quot;documents and effects?&quot;If someone invented a personal spaceship, would you have a right to go to space, assuming you could do it without endangering others?

&gt; Yeah, I&#x27;m still slightly pissed they basically waited until the majority was clear before they&#x27;d rule on the matter. Its another clear sign our Judiciary is really just as political as the politicians are, even if no one says so openly.I&#x27;m a strong supporter of gay marriage, but I&#x27;m glad the Court waited until the consensus was clear. At bottom, this isn&#x27;t a right flowing from the dictates of the Constitution. Nobody in 1789 would have said that gay marriage is a fundamental right. We acknowledge the right today for the same reason we acknowledge many other rights we did not acknowledge then--society as a whole has agreed to recognize the right and bind itself to enforcing it. It is important that the Court not act ahead of society.I&#x27;m also a strong supporter of abortion rights, but I can&#x27;t help but wonder if in the long run abortion rights wouldn&#x27;t be in a stronger position today had the Court waited a bit longer for public consensus to catch up before dictating a result.

It&#x27;s all the people coming over the last 15 years. It&#x27;s easier to hate an abstract notion of a person--all those gay stereotypes, plus what you hear in church--than someone you know and care about.

I don&#x27;t know. They had to start by striking down the federal benefits part of DoMA, and then return the issue to the lower courts to build up sufficient decisions (and precedent.) It takes time to do this. Frankly I&#x27;m astonished (and proud) that public opinion has shifted so quickly.

RGB specifically addressed why the supreme court wasn&#x27;t previously hearing marriage cases at that time - they don&#x27;t generally hear cases when the circuit courts are in agreement. Once the circuit split then they addressed the issue, but only then. In fact the dissent in DeBoer v. Snyder (which is one of the four cases that was combined for the Supreme Court) said  &quot;Because the correct result is so obvious, one is tempted to speculate that the majority has purposefully taken the contrary position to create the circuit split regarding the legality of same-sex marriage that could prompt a grant of certiorari by the Supreme Court and an end to the uncertainty of status and the interstate chaos that the current discrepancy in state laws threatens.&quot;

They really waited until they had no choice: they refused to hear all cases until there was a circuit split, then they had no choice but to resolve the split.

Yeah, I&#x27;m still slightly pissed they basically waited until the majority was clear before they&#x27;d rule on the matter. Its another clear sign our Judiciary is really just as political as the politicians are, even if no one says so openly.&gt; As late as October, the justices ducked the issue, refusing to hear appeals from rulings allowing same-sex marriage in five states. That decision delivered a tacit victory for gay rights, immediately expanding the number of states with same-sex marriage to 24, along with the District of Columbia, up from 19.&gt; Largely as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision not to act, the number of states allowing same-sex marriage has since grown to 36, and more than 70 percent of Americans live in places where gay couples can marry.

This will start shortly if it hasn&#x27;t already.

Though sometimes it can be entertaining. In the UK the debate included one lord embarrassing himself by &quot;warning&quot; that gay marriage might lead to a lesbian queen giving birth to a future monarch through artificial insemination, as well as musing about how it could allow said lord to marry his son to escape inheritance tax [1]I&#x27;m already looking forward to reading some of the tripe that will be written about this SCOTUS decision...[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;society&#x2F;2013&#x2F;may&#x2F;21&#x2F;tebbit-gay-marriage-lesbian-queen" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;society&#x2F;2013&#x2F;may&#x2F;21&#x2F;tebbit-gay-ma...</a>

I agree, I&#x27;m tired of hearing about this topic and the time wasted on it.Although, I&#x27;m waiting for the 3 consenting adults lawsuit, that will be interesting.EDIT: since the world is full of reactionaries that love to take things out of context; my public disclaimer on this is that I have no issue with this ruling.

They do have a bearing on other rights though. I issued a blanket statement and wanted to make sure to list that there were exceptions.

Felony convictions and mental health evals have no bearing on marriages currently

&gt; Glad this won&#x27;t be an issue going into the next presidential election.I wish this was true. But I think the decision will increase the discussion of marriage equality in the next election. Just look at the political impact abortion had after the supreme court decided Roe v. Wade. Abortion was used to galvanize conservative votes against liberals and SCOTUS.

&gt;Glad this won&#x27;t be an issue going into the next presidential election.Has this been an issue presidential elections? I don&#x27;t remember it being discussed at all.

Great news. Glad this won&#x27;t be an issue going into the next presidential election. There&#x27;s been so much time wasted on this issue when, at the end of the day, any 2 consenting adults should have all of the same rights as any other 2 consenting adults (barring felony conviction, poor mental health eval, etc).

There&#x27;s been a dull hum of religious conservatives worrying about consequences like this ever since the 2013 ruling.

There are quite a lot of people who argued that changing the definition of marriage was an infringement of their religious rights. I&#x27;ve never been clear on how that was supposed to happen but maybe you can dig it out of the oral arguments.

I think people may have a hard time separating the two. They feel that it is infringing upon their religion, and they associate that religion with the First Amendment which they use to express it.I also think they are putting it in there as a covering themselves, preempting the argument from others.

To be fair, the things you mention (slavery, segregation, oppression, even genocide) have been justified by people led by pure atheistic humanism effectively cloaking oppression in logic, academia and scientific theory (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot). I think it&#x27;s fair to say that people with all sorts of ideologies have treated those they fear, don&#x27;t understand or just plain don&#x27;t like pretty poorly.I&#x27;ll add that some who have been at the forefront of fighting for the abolishment of the oppressions you list have done so while following Christianity (MLK, Wilberforce)

Kennedy is addressing the idea (myth) that churches would be compelled to perform same-sex marriages or somehow face legal consequences for speaking on the issue.

&gt; Was this a question? I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve heard anyone ever say otherwise.As a former Mormon, I&#x27;ll give a resounding YES. Mormons have a persecution complex. And whenever Prop 8 or gay marriage is brought up it gets even worse. They tend to inflate opposition - you say &quot;we should legalize gay marriage&quot; and they will respond &quot;I have a right to talk about my religious beliefs!!&quot;

&gt;Was this a question? I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve heard anyone ever say otherwise.
You live in a very optimistic world! 2 quick examples: First, Glenn Beck and other popular conservatives have said exactly that, and worse: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theblaze.com&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;glenn-beck-if-gay-marriage-is-legalized-50-percent-of-congregants-will-fall-away-from-their-churches-within-five-years&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theblaze.com&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;glenn-beck-if-gay...</a>Second: Do you remember the Mormon funded ad blitz in California, which promised all kinds of (patently untrue) negative consequences if prop 8 went the wrong way? Kids being indoctrinated in grade school, churches of all kinds forced to cater to same sex couples, etc.

&gt; opinion also reasserted that people who are really mad about this can continue to be mad and vocal about it, as guaranteed by the First AmendmentWas this a question? I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve heard anyone ever say otherwise.I&#x27;ll add though, that people long have cloaked oppression in religion. People justified (and still justify) slavery, segregation, and oppression of women under the guise of religion, for example. Some might have been sincere (not that it justifies oppressing others), but for some the &#x27;ultimate&#x27; authority of their God is an effective defense against any mortal criticism.EDIT: To be clear, this is not a problem with religion in particular. I&#x27;m only discussing religion because that&#x27;s the issue on the table. Thanks to chrisguilbeau for pointing that out; I agree with his comment below.

I think Kennedy knew this was going to be read by far more laypersons than a typical opinion, and wrote it accordingly. It reads like a FAQ, going through all the common objections and concerns one by one and addressing them in order.

This is a case of states violating the constitution of the united states. It&#x27;s a pretty clear violation of equal protection. It&#x27;s not up to the states to decide this.Rights of a minority should not be left to the democratic process.

&gt; Can anybody counter Scalia, and say why the issue of gay marriage couldn&#x27;t wait to be resolved by the states?For the same reason that slavery couldn&#x27;t be resolved by the states. For the same reason that racism can&#x27;t be resolved by the states. Because these things haven&#x27;t gotten resolved by states. The United States of America, sadly, has a significant minority of people who Just Don&#x27;t Get It, and there are enough of them that if (when) they congregate they can form majorities in a number of states. And so the federal government needs to step in and dope-slap these people from time to time.

The same reason that the Civil Rights act had to be passed in the courts and the first students in integrated schools in the south had to be marched in with armed guard.&quot;Democracy&quot; is frequently used interchangeably with freedom, but never underestimate the power of a close-minded majority to rule with tyranny and impose their will and discrimination on a minority - racial, sexually-orientatated, or otherwise.

What happens when a member of a gay couple gets sick in a state that doesn&#x27;t recognize gay marriages? What do gay couples do when they file their federal taxes?

Marriage is a legally-binding contract. Since it is in the domain of public law, allowing religious beliefs to support or interfere with it would, in essence, allow the religion to be intertwined with the state itself. So, in my humble opinion, separation of church and state alone would require it to be legal for all people. In addition, just as states can&#x27;t pass a law to allow for racial segregation of contracts, they can&#x27;t pass a law to allow for class-based segregation of contracts.Of course, I am far from a lawyer, and this is a pure layman&#x27;s point of view.

&gt; In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.Basic human rights should not be subject to the &quot;democratic process&quot;.

&gt; Can anybody counter Scalia, and say why the issue of gay marriage couldn&#x27;t wait to be resolved by the states?Why should the States have the rights to prevent the exercise of a citizens civil rights granted by the US Constitution?The Constitiution, and the Bill of Rights explicitly, exists because there are things that are just not left up to &#x27;the majority&#x27; to come to a democratic decision over. They are rights that were recognized to be inalienable rights. Time and again, courts have had to step in to once again assert that these rights already belong to all citizens because the States have used the democratic process to trample and curtail them even though the highest law of the land already should have put such questions to rest.The Courts ruling says this. &quot;the Equal Protection Clause, like the Due Process Clause, prohibits this unjustified infringement of the fundamental right to marry.&quot; Their dicision is not based on new law, it is simply stating that the US Constitution already recognized these rights.Letting the States decide is letting the States pick and choose what parts of the Constitution they feel like following.

&gt; Can anybody counter Scalia, and say why the issue of gay marriage couldn&#x27;t wait to be resolved by the states? Why is this class of license inequity different than other classes, where the states&#x27; right to license something is not resolved by SCOTUS?Certainly with all the imagined legal expertise on HN, someone will answer. I have no expertise, but here&#x27;s a shot at least from a moral point of view and based on some limited legal and political principles:1) It can&#x27;t wait because people are suffering now, today. Read Martin Luther King&#x27;s &#x27;Letter from a Birmingham Jail&#x27;, where he points out that people who are not suffering always helpfully advise the oppressed to wait until later, &#x27;until a more convenient time&#x27;. After I read that, I began to notice that pattern often.2) We&#x27;re not a democracy; we are, and this is essential, a constitutional democracy. Democracy is mob rule, or as someone said (Isaac Asimov?), &#x27;democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what&#x27;s for dinner&#x27;. The Contitution, the Bill of Rights in particular, protects minority rights. It&#x27;s not up to legislatures or the majority to grant or take away those rights. Civil rights are purposely excluded from the democratic process.3) It&#x27;s disingenuous to describe an issue of civil rights and the long-time oppression of millions as a dispute over licensing. Was segregation about hotel accommodations? Slavery and women&#x27;s rights about employment disputes?

&gt; In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.Sounds like an argument against their existence. They didn&#x27;t have to take up the case...

Scalia&#x27;s argument isn&#x27;t that marriage equality is an issue for the states. It that it&#x27;s an issue for the legislature; that is, that the people should decide on it, rather than an interpretation of our secular scripture.It&#x27;s helpful to remember that the balance of powers were carefully designed, with an overarching purpose of not centralizing power into a monarchy or aristocracy. We are by design not a nation governed by a panel of philosopher-kings.Because the Supreme Court has lifetime tenure --- a design feature intended to isolate the justices from politics, not embed them in it --- there&#x27;s a lot of tension involved in their powers. Unlike politicians, they can&#x27;t easily be removed if there&#x27;s a popular outcry against their decisions. They&#x27;re the guardians of the Constitution. But the Constitution is first and foremost a document of procedural safeguards: it is most coherently and powerfully understood as a mechanism to ensure that all citizens have open channels to the decision-making of their own governance. The procedures of US government are meant to be zealously protected, but the substance is supposed to be left to the people.So a lot of the dissent in today&#x27;s result is best read as, &quot;regardless of what we think of marriage equality, who are we to override the decisions of the people?&quot; And further militating against today&#x27;s substantive intervention by five pro-equality justices is the fact that marriage equality isn&#x27;t really a process right. Whether or not your marriage is recognized has actually not much bearing on whether you&#x27;re capable of making your voice heard.Of course, there are even more powerful arguments in favor of marriage equality. For one thing, the black letter language of the Constitution, right smack in the beginning of it prior to any amendments, requires all the states to honor each other&#x27;s judicial proceedings, public acts, and records. To allow Mississippi to reject a Massachusetts same-sex marriage is to contravene the process set up in the Constitution directly. That can happen, but probably not when the conflict is animated entirely by discrimination against a class of people.All this is just to say: don&#x27;t be too quick to discard the intellectual argument against Supreme Court-enforced marriage equality. There will be times in your life where the same arguments are going to make a lot more sense, applied to other issues.

As a point in examining history the supreme court I thought was usually the case where issues like this bubble up. i.e.
Abortion
Women Voting (I think?)
Corporate Entities etc.

Wow. I just read it (for the interested, it starts on page 69 and is well worth the read for anyone even the slightest bit interested in constitutional law), and it brings up some very good points.My counter would be this: Of course it would be hubris to think that SCOTUS can &quot;create &#x27;liberties.&#x27;&quot; But that is not what SCOTUS is doing in this case. There&#x27;s a clear reading of the Bill of Rights where it is up to SCOTUS to clarify the definition of &quot;liberty&quot; or &quot;equal protection&quot; in the 14th Amendment as the general human understanding of human rights expands - as ambiguous language in the amended Constitution, it is very much in the federal judiciary&#x27;s domain.Now, if the states or the citizens feel strongly that this interpretation oversteps what should be the judiciary&#x27;s domain, then there&#x27;s a process for the other branches and the citizenry to tighten the limits of the judiciary&#x27;s domain. That is the process of a Constitutional amendment. But to say, as Scalia implies, that SCOTUS should wait for an amendment or legislation before being able to expand the interpretation of ambiguous language in the amended Constitution, is counter to the very mandate SCOTUS was given in the first place - it should not wait or falter when a reasonable case is presented to the body, and where constitutional language is ambiguous. I applaud the Court&#x27;s courage in living up to that mandate today....And at the end of the day, Mr. Scalia, when it comes to bodies-not-representative-of-the-human-citizenry broadly interpreting ambigous language in the fundamental Laws, we should truly be glad that this is what we&#x27;re seeing, not <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Evitable_Conflict" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Evitable_Conflict</a> ... :)

&quot;The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational. &quot;I can change this paragraph only slightly to come up with an absurdity.&quot;The fundamental right to vote does not include a right to make a State change its definition of suffrage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of suffrage (to be those related by blood to the historically dominant culture taking part in the political process) that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational.&quot;States are not free to define away your rights, it&#x27;s that simple.

Scalia says striking down campaign finance laws passed by congress and supported by the people was vital but striking down discriminatory marriage laws is extreme judicial overreach. There&#x27;s no principle there, it&#x27;s just the politically expedient argument for his ideological battles.

I believe the issue is that by passing a law prohibiting granting a marriage license to a same-sex couple, a State is violating that couple&#x27;s Fourteenth Amendment right to life, liberty, and equal protection, among other things.I will admit that there were a lot of high-soaring words that might have covered up the legal basis, but to me, the legal component of the ruling was simply:1) The court finds that marriage is an inherent part of life and liberty (arguably the shakiest part)2) A State passing a law prohibiting marriage by one specific group of people is taking away their rights of life and liberty3) Therefore, said law is found to violate the Fourteenth Amendment which grants life, liberty, and equal protection under the law to all United States citizens, and is thus unconstitutional.

Sorry, but as a lawyer totally in favor of gay marriage, Roberts, at least, is completely right on the legal theory.There has been basically nothing, in the history of our country, considered more of a state right than defining marriage.The supreme court is not a ruling council. Our constitution is about freedom from government intervention, not guaranteed government benefits.The debates over everything in the past that led to amendments looked roughly the same as the debate over same sex marriage. The only difference is this time a court ended it by deciding to change the constitution.

I agree with them in a sense -- it&#x27;s not democratic. Neither was desegregation. As the saying goes: democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.

Sorry, but as a lawyer totally in favor of gay marriage, Roberts, at least, is completely right on the legal theory.There has been basically nothing, in the history of our country, considered more of a state right than defining marriage.The supreme court is not a ruling council. Our constitution is about freedom from government intervention, not guaranteed government benefits.The debates over everything in the past that led to amendments looked roughly the same as the debate over same sex marriage.
For example, people beat each other on the floor of the senate chamber over slavery. The only difference to this debate is that a court ended it by deciding to change the constitution.This is not how the process is supposed to work. The fact that the majority of the US may be tired of a broken political system does not change this.

Essentially, the question is whether marriage is a right, or is it a privilege.If it is a right, then it should not be subject to the democratic process in the first place, so taking it out does not count as erosion. If it is a privilege, then it can be granted (or not) through the democratic process. The Court held today that it is a right.Disclaimer--I have not finished reading all the opinions yet.

IANAL. FYI, this is a constitutional issue that goes back to the early days of the court. See e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Judicial_review_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Judicial_review_in_the_United_...</a>The essential response from Kennedy et al. was two-fold:1. Marriage is a Right because the due process and equal protection clauses were designed to be interpreted broadly as society came to &quot;understand&quot; liberty in new ways. I think this is actually pretty damn accurate -- I have no doubt that some of the founding fathers had slavery on their minds, even though at the time the amendments we&#x27;re interpreted in that way.2. Rights are not subject to the &quot;vicissitudes&quot; of public opinion -- the democratic process doesn&#x27;t get to take away rights.Roberts and Scalia mostly disagreed with (1), but there was very little substance to their argument. Read through the four justifications given by Kennedy. Roberts and Scalia doesn&#x27;t respond to these. They just sort of complain about a slippery slope to tyranny. But this court is by far less activist than previous courts and we have yet to devolve into a dictatorship-by-SCOTUS. So I&#x27;m sceptical of the veracity of their slippery slope argument. It would have been more compelling if that had talked more about this specific case.Roberts and Scalia also made some more practical arguments, e.g. that democratically selected policies are more robust protections because they can hash out the details. I mostly believe that&#x27;s a false dichotomy because there&#x27;s very little evidence that courts conferring Rights upon groups of people actually shuts down legislative action or debate on either side of the question. Look at abortion or civil rights. Ultimately, I find this argument extremely ahistorical and massively empirically denied.(As an aside, I think Scalia&#x27;s &quot;o&#x27;weening pride will be our fall&quot; thing was a pretty dickish thing to say, given the overloaded connotations associated with pride in this case.)

Should the courts have waited for the state legislatures in the deep south to desegregate schools? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_v._Board_of_Education#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Educational_separation_in_the_US_prior_to_Brown_Map.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_v._Board_of_Education#&#x2F;m...</a>Should the courts have waited for the state legislatures in the deep south to legalize interracial marriage? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Interracial_marriage#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:US_miscegenation.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Interracial_marriage#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Fi...</a>The court needs the power to overrule legislatures because democratic majorities have consistently failed to protect the rights of minorities.

You could apply that to a lot of other situations. What about the right to own slaves? Southern states certainly preferred if that was handled at the state and not federal level.Sure, marriage is a &quot;license&quot; but you could make &quot;negro ownership&quot; a license thing and it wouldn&#x27;t change things.

The best argument is: that&#x27;s the way we do it in the US. We&#x27;ve never waited for complete agreement among the states before acting on the Federal level, regardless of whether it is a Constitutional Amendment or a SCOTUS decision.This article shows the number of states that have reached consensus on Women&#x27;s Suffrage, Interracial Marriage, Prohibition and a few other issues. Same-sex marriage has actually had more consensus than many of those other issues did before SCOTUS jumped in.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-pace-of-social-change&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2015-pace-of-social-change...</a>

Can you imagine if the repeal of Jim Crow laws had been left to the states? How long would it have been before Mississippi integrated?

Scalia&#x27;s opinion is that, effectively, the courts should be judging based on Scalia&#x27;s personal opinion of the &quot;legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation&quot;. He thinks the culture no longer interprets the constitution in, well, &quot;the right way&quot;.In the previous paragraph he points out how, effectively, any majority-leaning set of judges can just invent new rights to assign to the country and they will be permanent [or at least, until a later court overturns them]. And he&#x27;s right. But this is not news. Presidents have been trying to assign judges that lean their way on issues since... a long-ass time. The judges are human, moral, and they change their minds about how to interpret the law as the mob&#x27;s mood changes.And he&#x27;s right that the majority simply shoving it&#x27;s way down the minority&#x27;s throat is unjust and is going to breed contempt. When the North defeated the South, racial tension didn&#x27;t just disappear overnight. Those in the South kept a grudge and an ignorance that persists to this day. We may be using the power of the majority to force the removal of the flag, but those people who find that force offensive will not forget it. We didn&#x27;t convert them, convince them, or make them understand; we held the proverbial Public Relations gun to our leadership&#x27;s heads.You ask why the states shouldn&#x27;t have resolved the issue over time. Should the federal government have allowed some states to continue slavery? We all know it&#x27;s a crime against humanity now, but what actually makes it a crime? Is it some old english scribbled on some parchment centuries ago? Or is it merely an intangible, unwritten law that reversed itself naturally as society changed over time?The truth is, human civilizations have been morphing and evolving for thousands of years and they aren&#x27;t going to stop doing so because some old farts had an idea a couple hundred years ago and we&#x27;re trying to stick to their idea as hard as we can. Never changing, no matter how hard our society demands it, becomes simple fundamentalism, and our country was not founded on fundamentalism. Our country was founded - no matter how trite this sounds - on the idea of liberty over tyranny. We&#x27;re always going to lean more towards liberty than tyranny.We have a pretty good track record so far of not letting the states or federal government erode our liberty just because of the color of our skin, or our gender, or sexual identity, or religion. We protect people, always. But we don&#x27;t limit people just because we don&#x27;t like them or are afraid of them. Any time a state is asking to do that, we will eventually push back hard enough that the state will lose.

&gt; In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.That the issue made it to the supreme court shows that it is following the democratic process laid out in the constitution. If it has to be decided on by SCOTUS, the issue has already been through a number of other checks and balances. SCOTUS decisions are part of the American democratic process, and it&#x27;s incredibly disingenuous of Scalia to complain about it.Basically the &quot;this is not democratic process!&quot; is a standard dog-whistle cry put forward when conservatives lose a vote. Progressives have their own cries, of course, but &quot;this isn&#x27;t democratic, and the proof is that I didn&#x27;t win&quot; is a standard losing conservative trope.

Scalia is the same clown who opinionated that corporations are people and politicians can accept all the money lobby throws at them anonymously. When he gave this ruling, he never thought his Court was a threat to the democracy or he grossly misinterpreted constitution or completely disregarded founders original intent or violated deeply held belief of most Americans. But apparently gay marriage does all of that for him. His other dissents includes things ranging from teaching creationism in schools (yes, he supported that) to environmental law cases. In all of those dissents he openly accused his colleges for relying on their &quot;private&quot; opinion instead of actually adhering to their job of interpreting constitution. If you look at how he himself did his job so well to interpret constitution so that corporations have same rights as people even years before gay people can dream of, you see how his twisted view of the world is.Overall, I would expect justices in supreme court have display some level of courtesy, dignity and respect to their own colleges on the same bench. Accusing them as being unprofessional, incompetent and even intentionally so malign to declare them threat to nation every time they disagree with him - all these is clear indicator that Scalia is not fit for the bench. Unfortunately people have to suffer through him because of the rule that he can&#x27;t be replaced til life.

I&#x27;m glad that my LBG friends can now marry anywhere. But damn, Scalia&#x27;s counter opinion (and Roberts&#x27; opinion) strike me as well-considered and well-argued in the 2nd half of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;14pdf&#x2F;14-556_3204.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;14pdf&#x2F;14-556_3204.pdf</a> . In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.Can anybody counter Scalia, and say why the issue of gay marriage couldn&#x27;t wait to be resolved by the states? Why is this class of license inequity different than other classes, where the states&#x27; right to license something is not resolved by SCOTUS?

Luckily their participation is not necessary.

I don&#x27;t recall any bakers being punished for refusing to perform a gay marriage.  When did that happen?

Nothing happens to them.  Even today, Catholic clergy won&#x27;t perform many opposite-sex marriages unless certain conditions are met, like having it in a Catholic church and requiring pre-marriage counseling.

&gt; So what happens to clergy who refuse to perform such &quot;weddings&quot; on religious grounds?Nothing.&gt; We already have cases of punishing &amp; re-educating bakers for adhering to their religious views on the subject, how much more so those who may face compulsion to perform a union they cannot religiously condone?Clergy are not public accommodations and are not subject to non-discrimination law. Clergy in the US can still refuse to officiate interracial marriage for instance.The bakers you&#x27;re talking about were not &quot;punished and re-educated for adhering to their religious views&quot;, they were punished for discriminating against a protected class in the state they operated in. Just as they would have been punished for refusing cake to an interracial marriage, even if condoning it were against their sincerely held religious beliefs.But you really shouldn&#x27;t worry about that: this SCOTUS decision only forces states to issue and recognise marriage licenses to same-sex couples, it does not force them to make sexual orientation a protected class.And in all 29 states where sexual orientation still isn&#x27;t a protected class, same sex couples can have a cake-less marriage in the morning because businesses aren&#x27;t forced to serve them, and then get fired in the afternoon because their bosses can discriminate against them for reasons of sexual orientation.

Clergy have every right to refuse them. Other people have every right to express their views in peaceful, democratic fashion, e.g. picketing such churches, just as they would with a church that advocated any other distasteful view.No-one, those bakers included, is legally compelled to support gay marriage. Some people may find themselves economically compelled to do things they find distasteful, but to a certain extent that&#x27;s always true for anyone who has to work for a living.There are some things that we consider it unfair to economically compel people to do, e.g. OHSA. Do you think that should be extended to e.g. making it illegal to make someone&#x27;s job contingent on officiating gay marriages? What is the natural boundary there - should it be illegal to fire someone for doing something they&#x27;re politically opposed to? Should a barman have the right to e.g. refuse service to women because they don&#x27;t think women should be allowed to drink?

So what happens to clergy who refuse to perform such &quot;weddings&quot; on religious grounds? All major religions have at least a majority, if not uniform, disapproval of &quot;marrying&quot; any other than man &amp; woman. We already have cases of punishing &amp; re-educating bakers for adhering to their religious views on the subject, how much more so those who may face compulsion to perform a union they cannot religiously condone?ETA: to wit, how to reconcile the court&#x27;s ruling with the court&#x27;s claim none will be compelled to facilitate such unions against their faith?

The four dissenting opinions in this case are interesting. They deal mainly with the fact that, strictly, such pronouncements are not within the authority of the Supreme Court. They are correct, in a sense. But by that logic, Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. V. U.S. (1964) should not be; by that logic, we should have waited for America to realize, of its own volition in 50 states, that allowing a business to deny a black man a hotel room is fundamentally wrong. But for the group wronged -- consider the same-sex couples facing the death of a spouse, the endless and expensive legal hurdles, or the millions of black Americans who couldn&#x27;t sit at a lunch counter -- waiting for all 50 states to come to the right conclusion is cruel. No, the court has a moral obligation, where it can, to stand up for the people for whom justice for all would come too late. It&#x27;s certainly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. But the Founders were not infallible, were not seers of the future; it is just as incongruous to hold them responsible for their failures as it is to hold us responsible for our failures we have not yet realized.

For me and a lot of friends and family, marriage equality. Yay.&quot;It is now clear that the challenged laws burden the liberty of same-sex couples, and it must be further acknowledged that they abridge central precepts of equality . . . Especially against a long history of disapproval of their relationships, this denial to same-sex couples of the right to marry works a grave and continuing harm. The imposition of this disability on gays and lesbians serves to disrespect and subordinate them. And the Equal Protection Clause, like the Due Process Clause, prohibits this unjustified infringement of the fundamental right to marry.&quot; (page 22, from the coverage on SCOTUSBlog)For others, the opinion also reasserted that people who are really mad about this can continue to be mad and vocal about it, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.&quot;Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who believe allowing same-sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and searching debate.&quot; (page ~32)The full majority opinion [PDF]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;14pdf&#x2F;14-556_3204.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;14pdf&#x2F;14-556_3204.pdf</a>

On my birthday in April, my partner Andrew proposed to me in a Minion mascot costume, handing me a solid gold Ring of Power from Lord of the Rings, which was set into a Chicken McNugget, while a live vocalist sang &quot;I Say a Little Prayer for You.&quot; When we get married I will feel so grateful to have fallen in love in the present.

I did think about that a bit. That&#x27;s part of why I added the disclaimer. I included it more because I was watching it this weekend, saw that bit, and thought, &quot;That would be a really unacceptable thing to say today, but back then it was considered funny.&quot; Edit: And you&#x27;re right, comedians are on a different standard. Sorry, forgot to include that.

And, in fairness, sex - gay or straight - is fundamentally pretty gross. Fun, but gross.

Quoting a comedian as a means of reflecting what&#x27;s popular or at least socially acceptable is an appropriate and accurate way to say &quot;at one point in recent history, it was socially acceptable to say demeaning things about gay people.&quot;Michael Richards is a comedian, and made anti-Semitic remarks that resulted in a significant backlash. Again, looking back this is a good indication of someone saying something that was NOT popularly acceptable.

Dave Chappelle is a comedian, they say stuff like that all the time, it&#x27;s part of their job. If you are going to quote somebody (specially on these issues), I&#x27;d recommend not to quote a comedian.

I still think that gay (two men) sex us gross... or any sex with a man. Which is why I don&#x27;t engage in it, but I&#x27;m pretty grateful that about 50% of the inhabitants of Earth enjoys it!

&gt;Eleven Years ago, Dave Chappelle just outright said &quot;gay sex is just gross, sorry it just is&quot;, and it was considered funny and acceptable. (Not harping on him specifically, just pointing out what it was like in 2004)iirc the bit you&#x27;re referring to was how saying outrageous things is viewed as acceptable when a white woman does it.In the black Bush piece he said &#x27;and no gays settling down!&#x27; to poke fun at the GOP.

You can&#x27;t just pull a quote like that out of context. Chappelle said the &quot;gay sex is gross&quot; thing twice, once was in the black bush character (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EoDpghAaXT4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EoDpghAaXT4</a>) and the other was when he had a white girl sing his thoughts:&quot;Gay sex is gross; sorry, I just think it is. (gets another card) Unless, of course, they&#x27;re lesbians. (gets another card) I like lesbians. (gets another card) I like lesbians.&quot;Which is super tame compared to a lot of the other things Chappelle said back then, or even Louis CK says nowadays.

I dunno, I&#x27;m a straight guy and it doesn&#x27;t bother me. It used to but one day I realized it was just socially instilled gay panic.

&gt; Any straight guy willA small change makes your sentence more truthy: &quot;Many straight guys will&quot;.This isn&#x27;t just a quibble. Public safety gave up using &quot;gay men&quot; because so many men do not identify as gay but do have sex with men. Thus, MSM is now used instead.

Any straight guy will, if given the choice, avoid scenes of man on man sex as much as possible. They might say it&#x27;s &quot;just not my thing&quot; out of politeness or tact but watch what they do. When Chapelle said it it was funny because everyone watching can relate and it&#x27;s a tension reliever to hear what you&#x27;ve been bottling up is actually true. Much comedy works this way.

DADT was in 1994 IIRC? This idea that gay people were lepers 10 years ago is false, 21 years ago the military was already doing everything it could to put off the pressure of allowing gays in the military (and DADT was their compromise).This is a generational thing, this latest is but 1 victory in a long procession of victories. To pretend otherwise is balderdash.

In my lifetime, I think this is the social issue that has seen the most positive change.As a kid, gay people were practically lepers.Eleven Years ago, Dave Chappelle just outright said &quot;gay sex is just gross, sorry it just is&quot;, and it was considered funny and acceptable. (Not harping on him specifically, just pointing out what it was like in 2004)Seven years ago prop 8 passed, if barely with some caveats about lack of understanding.And now? SCOTUS upholds gay marriage and it&#x27;s socially reprehensible to mock homosexuality. It&#x27;s a strange and very positive feeling watching a country&#x27;s world view shift like this.

Civil rights should matter to all of us, not just the people who lacked them.

It wouldn&#x27;t have been such a big deal if there weren&#x27;t so many legal things tied to it. Taxes, medical, property rights etc.

To be fair, it&#x27;s that big of an issue among conservative Christians as well, when I reality there are much bigger issues that fall under that group&#x27;s area of concern.

What makes you think that people have not been and do not continue to fight for those issues at the same time as they have been fighting for this issue? There is not one &quot;leftist&quot; who can only address one issue at a time and there are lots of other people besides that &quot;leftist&quot; who are pushing for progressive change.I wonder why this bothers you so much and why you seem so dismissive of the issue.

Tell that to the widow who lost custody of their children since their state didn&#x27;t recognize their marriage and didn&#x27;t have 2 party adoptions.

I agree with you strongly. There are more pressing issues that could be detrimental to the global population that should take prescience.

the readers here are young and educated, which for practical purposes translates to being fascist.Fascism is best defined by the degree to which the overclass controls the youth of a nation by propaganda. Because the youth of today have been pushed into college, that means they are highly propagandized.And of course the overclass loves it when they can force the youth of the nation to focus on an issue such as gay rights. Not only is it a natural wedge issue, making it harder for the people to unite against the overclass, but by leading youth into social issues leftism and away from hardcore economic leftism, this is a win-win for the overclass.Anyway, this dynamic in play here with gay marriage is a perfect window into american fascism.

Interesting how hard you got down voted.I don&#x27;t disagree with marriage equality at all, but I also believe that the whole &quot;culture war&quot; has been horribly destructive to our ability to address more pressing issues. It&#x27;s been a fantastic divide-and-conquer tactic to con lower income (and usually socially conservative) people into voting against their economic best interests, and to prevent the formation of any meaningful progressive coalition on these issues.Hopefully we can reach some kind of consensus here and put some of this to bed so we can move on to things that are, I hate to say it, much more important -- like the things you list.

Just calling something a fallacy makes you seem smart, but doesn&#x27;t make you right.Is media attention infinite? Does your government can discuss infinite number of issues? I don&#x27;t think so.

Gay people fighting for their rights doesn&#x27;t stop anyone else fighting for anything else.Zero-sum fallacy.If you want gay people to stop being all annoying and campaigny, then get people to stop persecuting us all around the world.

good...now maybe the so-called &quot;leftists&quot; can put this issue aside and concentrate on issues that matter to more than about 1% of the population...I refer to these really &quot;silly&quot; issues like wages, single-payer healthcare (obamacare is a mess), trade, flooding of the labor supply, the drug war, worker rights and benefits, more time off and vacation, monopolies, regulatory capture, NIMBYized zoning&#x2F;regs (aka affordable housing)...you know, the issues that matter to all americans, the issues that used to occupy leftists before they got sidetracked with The Most Important Issue Of All Time.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this. A truly epic win.

I don&#x27;t know all (or many) of the specifics but I know a big one is that in certain states&#x2F;situations partners were not guaranteed visitation rights in the hospital on the grounds that they weren&#x27;t legally married.

I believe immigration and federal taxes, which are handled solely by the federal government, are not affected as the US (on a national level) already recognized same-sex marriages after the DOMA overrule.

There are a ton of legal ramifications, including tax benefits (it&#x27;s advantageous for a married couple to file income taxes jointly), immigration (spousal visas etc.), inheritance, and so on.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rights_and_responsibilities_of...</a>

I think estate planning and inheritance all could have been done before (you can leave your money&#x2F;assets to whoever). This just ensures your spouse gets it even if you don&#x27;t have a will.

The big ones are hospital visitation rights, being able to file joint federal taxes, and estate planning and inheritance benefits.

Social security, tax benefits, death benefits (including child custody), health insurance coverage, legal (marital communications privilege) There are probably thousands of these baked into our state and federal laws.Check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States#Rights_and_benefits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rights_and_responsibilities_of...</a>and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nolo.com&#x2F;legal-encyclopedia&#x2F;marriage-rights-benefits-30190.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nolo.com&#x2F;legal-encyclopedia&#x2F;marriage-rights-benef...</a>

As a non american, does the US Government have an official definition of marriage that is going to change today?I understand the social consequences. But what legal rights have been granted now that did not exist previously ?

The oral arguments are worth a listen, from back in April.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oyez.org&#x2F;cases&#x2F;2010-2019&#x2F;2014&#x2F;2014_14_556" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oyez.org&#x2F;cases&#x2F;2010-2019&#x2F;2014&#x2F;2014_14_556</a>Mary Bonauto argued it perfectly, I thought.

Yeah. Technically gay marriage bans were struck down. Whatever.

Thanks, we updated it to that of the article.

I&#x27;m happy for the gay community. At least the Supreme Court is not fully corrupted.

Marriage is not about love. It is about property. The government&#x2F;state doesn&#x27;t give two flying ducks about whether two people get married because they love each other, are in love (infatuated) with each other, or just like each other. Love is not required to get married.Marriage involves determining and transferring property rights (before, during, and after a marriage).A marriage license and a state recognized marriage is a three party agreement. It&#x27;s an agreement between the two spouses and the government. It gives consent to the government to arbitrate marital issues and in return the government gives benefits to the individuals getting married.ADD: Due to a marriage being a three party agreement, state recognized polygamy gets really complicated really fast, especially when multiple states might be involved.

I guess we found each other. The things that irritate me the most is that people believe that marriage is a right. It is not. It is a government granted legal status privilege. The privilege grants those recognized as married numerous benefits. Now, with that said, I can&#x27;t see why allowing any two consenting adults who wish to extend the government recognized benefits to each other should be infringed. One question though is, what benefit does the state&#x2F;government gain from [recognizing] marriage? I think the quickest and easiest answer is that a) two people sharing and taking care of each other is beneficial [to society] and b) should a divorce occur, the state can get involved ensuring that a[n ex-]spouse is treated fairly and taken care of.ADD: Also, people keep mixing love and marriage. While the two often go hand in hand that isn&#x27;t always the case.

Oh, I get it, and my intent is not to downplay the significance of this to same-sex couples.My point is that anybody wailing and gnashing their teeth over this is being incredibly short-sighted.

&gt; That&#x27;s why my reaction is &quot;meh&quot;: as a &quot;problem&quot;, SSM isn&#x27;t even on the radar.I realize I&#x27;m approaching the question from a different angle than you are, but I want to point out that it was a very big problem for gay and lesbian Americans and their loved ones.

You argue with the sanctity of marriage. But which modern authority makes it sacred?

I&#x27;m a straight conservative (more fiscal than social, and sure as hell not Republican any more), and my reaction to this is: &quot;meh&quot;. The writing has been on the wall for a while now, and anybody surprised by this hasn&#x27;t been paying attention.Any social conservatives on HN -- that is to say, both of you -- should keep in mind that if you&#x27;re worried about how this affects the sanctity of marriage, that institution has long since been sullied by a) allowing government to get involved with it, b) easily-obtainable divorces and c) that whole Henry VIII business. Same-sex couples can&#x27;t possibly do any more damage than that.Of the threats to American culture or even Western Civilization as a whole, the SSM boogeyman pales in comparison to a feckless electorate, unaccountable government with Big Brother aspirations, crushing debt and even Islamic extremists.That&#x27;s why my reaction is &quot;meh&quot;: as a &quot;problem&quot;, SSM isn&#x27;t even on the radar.

Basically.  That&#x27;s how most constitutional arguments work.

Strictly speaking it means the laws against gay marriage were themselves illegal.  (As with any law deemed unconstitutional.)  It&#x27;s a matter of word choice to say &quot;gay marriage was always legal&quot; versus &quot;anti-gay marriage laws were always illegal&quot;.  There&#x27;s some semantic difference between the two, but I&#x27;m not sure what the difference is from a judicial standpoint.

That&#x27;s basically correct. It&#x27;s always been legal, and efforts to stop gay marriage have basically been efforts to narrow the scope of this already legal right.

Does this formally mean that gay marriage has been legal in the US since the 18th century, but no one noticed until recently? (half-serious question)Congratulations to Americans and to gays worldwide for this great step forward.

&quot;In forming a marital union, two people become something greater&quot;I wonder if the american constitution has the word &quot;two&quot; hardwired anywhere.

&quot;No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies
the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice,
and family. In forming a marital union, two people become
something greater than once they were. As some of
the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage
embodies a love that may endure even past death. It
would misunderstand these men and women to say they
disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do
respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its
fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned
to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s
oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the
eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.&quot;

...get permission from a tiny group of powerful people in order to get the government to recognize your marriage.

&gt; While this is excellent news for my gay and lesbian friends, I see no progress on polygamy.Or indeed, on the fundamental issue, which is the need to get permission from a tiny group of powerful people in order to get married.

&gt; Polygamy is a deeply troublesome arrangement, with a storied history of abuse.As is traditional marriage, but to a much larger extent.

In Europe in the modern era, the trend is more in the other direction: as society gains more respect for both men and women&#x27;s choice of sexual self-determination, instead of being fixated on traditional opposite-sex, pair-courtship rituals, polyamorous relationships are becoming more accepted. They were once strongly disapproved of and even illegalized, but are now increasingly being seen as a legitimate personal choice. On the activist side, many (most?) LGBTQ organizations also include poly activists, especially the organizations which have a more left-wing flavor.I think the more likely path than legal polygamy, though, is to expand a more flexible set of legal arrangements for families, as a replacement for traditional marriage being the legal framework. The fact that a huge proportion of couples here (Denmark) no longer get married is already forcing that for another reason. Since many families which otherwise look traditional — long-term cohabitation of an opposite-sex couple, jointly raising children of which they&#x27;re parents, etc. — don&#x27;t get married, marriage as the organizing principle of families is becoming less relevant, so the law already has to start handling things differently.

Replace Polygamy in your comment with marriage and see what happens:Marriage is a deeply troublesome arrangement, with a storied history of abuse.Yes, there is probably more abuse in marriages then outside, but this is not an argument against marriage, but against abuse.

&quot;Polygamy will further the deterioration of society!&quot;
&quot;Polygamy has a history of abuse!&quot;And where have we heard precisely these arguments before?People are great.

Monogamy also has a storied history of abuse. Up until the 1970&#x27;s it was perfectly legal for a man to rape his wife. This does not make it fundamentally impossible for healthy and consensual monogamous relationships to exist, and neither does the supposed behavior of 19th century Mormons make it impossible for healthy and consensual polygamous relationships to exist.

Polygamy is a deeply troublesome arrangement, with a storied history of abuse. It has been steadily abandoned and outlawed as societies grant more legal rights and self-determination to women.There is simply no way to legally recognize poly* relationships under the law in a way that resembles binary marriage.

&gt; Polygamy is a Christian institution. It was pointedly prescribed in the old testament.Correction: &quot;Christian&quot; refers to Jesus Christ, which does not appear in the old testament. Catholics, Ortodoxes and many protestant churches are against polygamy.

&gt; It was pointedly prescribed in the old testament.That&#x27;s a common misconception. It was described, but not prescribed. The polygamy in the Old Testament is universally portrayed as dysfunctional.

I think that&#x27;s the wrong argument to make. There were a lot of things said in the Old Testament that aren&#x27;t considered by most Christians to be applicable to them. The &quot;Old Covenant&quot; was, as the Jewish maintain today, between God and the Jews. For most Christians (more specifically, Catholics and several other groups), the laws in the Old Testament ceased to be valid when Jesus proclaimed the way into Heaven.That said, it is true that the bible doesn&#x27;t disapprove of polygamy. The Old Testament is filled with examples of God condoning it (Lamech, Esau, Jacob, Gideon, Solomon... The list of men with multiple wives goes on and on - God even gave Saul&#x27;s wives to David), and the New Testament has a few &quot;mentions&quot;, so to speak: Paul&#x27;s letter to the Corinthians, which explicitly says it&#x27;s his opinion and not law, Ephesians, and a few others that are suggestive of opinion and not law. But honestly, appealing to biblical authority is fraught with oppositions that focus on the numerous inconsistencies in the bible.I believe that polygamy is a personal and&#x2F;or moral belief, and while I&#x27;m personally an atheist, and personally do not have an interest or stake in debating the morality or religious support of it, I recognize that there are potential and actual inconsistencies with how rights and responsibilities are handled with respect to polygamists, and hope they&#x27;re able to find the path to equality.Selfless love knows no bounds, frankly. It&#x27;s the selfish ones that need to find humility before they find peace.

No. Polygamy happened in the Old Testament. It was never prescribed and it never ended well.

Polygamy is a Christian institution.  It was pointedly prescribed in the old testament.  Modern anti-polygamists will argue that the old testament prescription was a matter of necessity, and that new testament language (particularly Paul&#x27;s) prescribes monogamy, but to my eyes the new testament&#x27;s position is pretty casual, while the old testament&#x27;s is quite strong.

Worth noting that at least one of the triples I referred to is a woman and two men. At least one is a man and two women. I&#x27;m being vague here, because bigamy is a felony.We really have quite a long way to go on this front.

&gt;One of the problems with polygamy&#x2F;andry is that we could hollow out the lower social classes of mating opportunitiesAnd this doesn&#x27;t already happen? M&#x2F;Dating does not require marriage.

polygamy is a correct term. polyandry&#x2F;polygyny are specializations

&gt; One of the problems with polygamy&#x2F;andry is that we could hollow out the lower social classes of mating opportunitiesLet&#x27;s not bring up the argument of legislating for maximal gene propagation, unless you&#x27;re willing to ban all forms of marriage that don&#x27;t serve maximal gene propagation. Fertility tests before marriage! No marriage among the elderly, because what&#x27;s the point! Let&#x27;s set up a new 3-letter agency for matchmaking!Marriage is not a government mechanism to encourage mating. Stop trying to put government in the business of animal husbandry. We&#x27;re not animals.

&gt;Without getting unduly personal, let&#x27;s say that I have a stake in that question being resolved. I know several triples living quietly among us; they face the same kind of problems (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) as same-sex couples faced prior to this decision.I made that argument to a couple of friends - that they were not fighting for equality (which will be fairly easy to set up) but for inclusion in the privileged club. They responded with &quot;Well marriage is between couples, but defining the sex of the participants is discriminatory&quot;.One of the problems with polygamy&#x2F;andry is that we could hollow out the lower social classes of mating opportunities (it happens in india and china right now due to girl infanticide and it is not pretty).Anyway - congratulations to the winners.

I would bet the biggest opposer to divorce will be the INS ... imagine the Green Card businesses that would enable! After all, it should make little difference to INS whether people choose to have their multiple marriages in series or in parallel.

I would bet the biggest opposer to polygamy will be the INS ... imagine the Green Card businesses that would enable!

I&#x27;m poly and I&#x27;m more for abandoning marriage-laws all together and keep this stuff to religions.

That&#x27;s much more along the lines of what I think. It&#x27;s kind of the libertarian dilemma - with Gay Marriage, there&#x27;s one huge, loud camp of religious homophobic bigots demanding that big daddy Government say that Gay Marriage is an illegal abomination, and another huge, loud group of homosexual-rights activists demanding that big daddy Government say that Gay Marriage is a-ok and governments everywhere are required to perform it. It was never really about marriage or anything - it&#x27;s about getting the Government to bless your side of the argument with a magical scepter of rightness.Meanwhile, my&#x2F;our camp of libertarians saying hey, the Government really shouldn&#x27;t be in the business of deciding who can be in what sort of relationship with who else or blessing either side of a controversial argument is disappointingly small and quiet and usually ignored.

The key word there is &quot;adults.&quot; Polygamist communities have a documented tendency to seek out younger and younger women for marriage. (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;367&#x2F;1589&#x2F;657" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;367&#x2F;1589&#x2F;657</a>)EDIT: added source; had previously assumed this was common knowledge

I&#x27;m not saying you&#x27;re doing this, but this line of thinking is very often employed to minimize the damage done by discriminatory decision-making under the guise of &quot;waiting for the perfect solution&quot;. Fixing what hurts people now is better than telling them to wait for something that will in all likelihood never actually come.

How could it be consensual between all adults? The marriage &quot;license&quot; in polygamy is between man and women, yet by secondary effects the women are fully entangled with one another. Yet if you watch any show on polygamy you&#x27;ll see that a guy will keep adding new, younger wives while holding their current wives hostage (due to their lack of another option in terms of housing, money, etc). It&#x27;s absurd to think that any thinking person would get in on the wife side of the polygamy pact when in the end they have their equality divided by X wives.Smart folks have said that the reason homosexual marriage even became a thought was because of the transformation of marriage from a bond of ownership of man over woman to a shared partnership. A polygamous arrangement (as per the mormon church, not the polyamorous relationships of the hippies, etc) ends up with a hierarchy of power with one man controlling multiple wives, with the power to divorce, ruin, etc the others if they don&#x27;t allow him to wed again.I think an argument for polyamorous marriage could be made, but polygamy is essentially a raw deal for whoever isn&#x27;t the hub of the marriage wheel (one man in the case of traditional mormonism, islam, etc.).

I have no problem with polygamy, as long as it is a consensual relationship between all adults involved.The real problem is that government has gotten into the marriage business and it doesn&#x27;t belong there. The issues you mentioned (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) really have nothing to do with marriage and should all be assignable without a government endorsed marital contract.

That same concern already equally applies to traditional marriage, in which some % are abusive. If you have a problem with polygamy on that basis, then you&#x27;ve got a drastically larger problem with the already existing system of marriage, in which millions of instances of abuse occur annually.The best solution is to bring polygamy out into the open, legalize it fully nationally.The government has no business dictating who can get married, or what the structure of marriage looks like, so long as the people in question are of sound mind and adults.If I want to form a ten person marriage, with five men and five women, whose business is it to control us and stop us? There are only bigoted &#x27;answers&#x27; as to why that shouldn&#x27;t be allowed.

what a bogus argument. You&#x27;re saying because &#x27;some modern polygamy situations&#x27; are unhealthy, we should hope to keep it illegal?You&#x27;re going to freak out when you learn about the divorce rate.

One problem I have with Polygamy is that I have never seen a 1-woman, multi-husband community. Sure, I&#x27;ve seen a few relationships in which this was the case, but when you look at the historic aspects in the US, it seems a very rare thing. That makes me wonder if there is a severe power imbalance in the relationships and what is truly occurring.It&#x27;s well known that in some modern US polygamy situations, there is a great deal of abuse of power, both in terms of controlling the wives, as well as controlling and abusing the young men who will not be allowed to have a wife. This further increases the societal costs and leads to more abuse of power, which is not what we need.edit: I should add: It&#x27;s a numbers game. Given that on average, there tends to be just slightly more women born than men, what happens with all the extra unmarried men (or women, though this is rarer)?

While this is excellent news for my gay and lesbian friends, I see no progress on polygamy.Which, unlike same-sex marriage, is an institution with deep roots both in America (the Mormons were forced to give up this sacrament as a condition of statehood) and in the majority of world cultures, where it ranges from condoned to celebrated.Without getting unduly personal, let&#x27;s say that I have a stake in that question being resolved. I know several triples living quietly among us; they face the same kind of problems (child custody, hospital visitation, inheritance rights) as same-sex couples faced prior to this decision.What the polygamists of the nation lack is a powerful lobby. &lt;shrug&gt; One may hope that nonetheless, reason and freedom will prevail here as well.EDIT: nation, not world. Worldwide the situation is different. America is suffering from its Christian legacy here. Most Christian countries are adamant about denying this right to their citizens.

Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules